WHEN MANY COUNTRIES IN WESTERN EUROPE ARE EXPERIENCING A flux or even a teeming confusion in their party systems, West Germany stands out as a case of almost aberrant cohesion. The ageold yearning for ‘the German synthesis’ finds its apparent modern fulfilment in the party system. The uncomfortable extremes of left and right have for long hovered around virtual electoral extinction, and the rise of new movements – such as forms of neo-Poujadism in Scandinavia or the rediscovery of the territorial dimension of politics as in Britain – has left the Federal Republic untouched. The two major contenders for power, the SPD and the CDU, dominate the electoral scene, and in so doing seem to be locked in an embrace from which neither is able to escape.

EVERY HUMANITARIAN ACTION TAKES PLACE WITHIN A POLITICAL context. This means that all humanitarian organizations, such as those which operate under the sign of the Red Cross, must devise a humanitarian policy which will be valid in the long term, based on a thorough analysis of the political context, the characteristic features of an epoch, the structures of political societies, the interaction of profound forces and the world political system. This humanitarian policy in its turn entails the development of a humanitarian strategy which is distinct from the tactical moves imposed by the diversity of situations and crises. Neglect of this work of reflection results in contradiction and confusion and, worse still, humanitarian activity can be degraded into a tool of politics.

WHILE IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO MEASURE QUANTITATIVELY THE extent of corruption in any polity, it may well be that in an absolute sense it is more prevalent (although not necessarily more conspicuous) in ‘developing’ economies and polities, than in societies with relatively high standards of living. This, if it is so, results from a concatenation of politico-economic factors which fosters the spread of corrupt practices in virtually all dealings between the citizenry and the state. In what follows, we shall consider three forms of corruption – endemic, planned, and developmental – which, while analytically distinct, are not necessarily so legally or operationally. In everyday life they form a whole which will now be pulled apart. However, taken together these three forms may literally add up to ‘systemic’ corruption. This means simply that as a proportion of the total resources and talents available to an economy, those tied up in corruption are particularly high and alternatives in achieving individual or collective ends particularly few. These propositions must remain tentative, and instinct as much as hard measurement has informed them. Further, the trifold categorization of corruption used here is largely descriptive, and it is not my intention to undertake an exhaustive examination of causes nor to suggest remedies. However, a good deal will be said about effects.

THE CONVERSATION (AS MICHAEL OAKESHOTT WOULD CALL IT) THAT is political theory finds itself these days starved for interlocutors. There are talkers aplenty, but they do little listening and pursue their several idioms not for the pleasure of language but in order to urge positions and promote interests. Philosophers like Rawls and Nozick join the conversation in order to demonstrate, thanks to the irrefutable logical foundations they presume to discover for justice, how most effectively to conclude it. Liberal sce tics like Karl Popper trust talk no more than philosophy, and opt for straightforward problem-solving. For Marxists, conversation can only obscure or reveal action – and action is where (as Marxism's American roponents might put it) the action is. In each of these modes of discourse, the goal is advocacy, certainty, justification – a resolution of, not a conversation about political issues. Moreover, as if the ranks of conversationalists were not already decimated, death has, in the last year or two, silenced the voices of three giants: John Plamenatz, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.